Story Of The Alphabet

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THE ST^XRY OF
THE ALPHABET

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STORY OF

the

ALPHABET

By OTTO F. EGF.

The Cleveland School of Art

"Many thanks to old Cadmus,
Who made us his debtors
By inventing, one day, those
CAPITAL LETTERS."

— Saxe

PUBLISHED BY

NORMAN T. A. MUNDER &? CO.

Printers

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

Copyright 1921 by
Norman T. A. Munder & Co.

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THE STORY OF
THE ALPHABET

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Its Evolution and Development

Do you know your J B C's? Each Letter
Character Has a History and a Reason
■Its Present Form. Have you Ever Questioned
Origin and Significance of the Alphabet?

j[UR transition from bar-
barism to civilization can
be attributed to the al-
phabet. Those great pre-
historic discoveries and
inventions such as the
making of a fire, the use
of tools, the wheel and the axle, and even our
modern marvelous applications of steam and
electricity pale into insignificance when com-
pared with the power of the alphabet. Simple
as it now appears after the accustomed use of
ages, it can be accounted not only the most
difficult, but also the most fruitful of all the
achievements of the human intellect.

Man lived by "bread alone" and without
the alphabet untold ages, and with a practical
ilphabetic system not more than 3,000 years.
So important and wonderful was this step
"emed by those who lived nearer the time of
inception — in the time before the wonder
-s extraordinary powers had been blunted
ing possession and common use — that its
ention, as well as that of writing, was in-
variably attributed to divine origin.

Modern investigation always seeks sources
other than mythological ones, and thus the
science of ancient handwriting, paleography,
came into existence. In the last hundred and

[3]

I4q4-T

The Story of the Alphabet

twenty-five years the writing of the ancient
Egyptians, which was a "sealed book" for
nearly twenty centuries, has been deciphered
through the efforts of Champollion and Young;
the mysterious cuneiform characters of an-
cient Assyria and Babylon have been inter-
preted by Grotofend and Rawlinson, and the
"missing link" to connect our present alpha-
betic system to these ancient ones is being
partly completed by Sir Arthur Evans, who is
compiling and analyzing Cretan characters
and pre-Phoenician writing. The story, how-
ever, will probably never be told in its en-
tirety.

THE forms of our letters, with the excep-
tion of G, J, U, W, reached their full
development two thousand years ago. The
Roman letter was the parent of all the styles
notwithstanding the diversity that has ap-
peared in Europe since the beginning of the
Christian era. With a little imagination it is
not difficult to note the resemblance between
similar letters of the old Roman capitals and
those following that have been designated as
script, italic, Old English or black letter, ver-
sal, uncial, and an endless list of alphabet fami-
lies. The desire for speed, and the influence of
the tool, pen, reed, chisel, brush, were the de-
termining factors in the change of form. Cu-
riously enough instead of being archaic, the
Roman alphabet, which is now 2,000 years old,
is still the most useful because of its legibility,
and also the most beautiful.

We derived twenty-three of our letters from
the Romans. They had taken probably eight-
een of these from the Greeks about the fourth
century B. C. and afterwards borrowed else-
where or invented seven more. Instead of giv-

C4}

4

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The Story of the Alphabet

ing them names as the Greeks did, they simply
called them by the sounds for which they stood :
A (ah), B (bay). They introduced the curve
wherever possible, whereas the early Greek
letters were all angular — what an interesting
analogy is evident in the architecture of those
two peoples, the temple pediment and angu-
larity of the Greeks as contrasted with the
dome and arch of the Romans.

The Greeks, in their contact with those
great traders and "Yankees of ancient time,"
the Phoenicians, saw the value of their alpha-
betic writing and inaugurated its use about
the time of the first Olympiad, 776 B. C. Three
or four centuries before they gave it to the
Romans the ancient Greeks found use for fif-
teen of the Phoenician letters and then con-
ceived enough to round out an alphabet of
twenty-four characters.The changes that took
place in the shape of their letters can be at-
tributed to their sense of order; the letters are
balanced better and the parts better related.

' I ''HE Greeks were interested in the sound
-1 value only, not in the picture value of
the symbol, and, therefore, they probably did
not notice that A, for instance, had ever been
a picture of the head of an ox and that it was
now drawn upside down; and that the Phoe-
nician name "Alpeh" meant ox and that they
mispronounced thesoundincallingit "Alpha."
The Romans borrowed from the Greeks
and the Greeks had borrowed from the Phoe-
nicians, but where did the Phoenicians obtain
their letters ? Did they invent them ? To what
extent were these letters influenced by earlier
systems of writings as those employed by the
Cretan, Assyrian and Egyptian civilizations?
These are questions that probably will never

The Story of the Alphabet

be answered satisfactorily. Many arguments
and theories are advanced. We can, however,
trace back with certainty a number of our
letters to the Phoenician alphabet of iooo B.
C. Beyond this all is, at present, a matter of
conjecture.

The Phoenician alphabet consisted of twen-
ty-two pictures of familiar objects. These pic-
tures were rudely and simply made, for writers
and readers soon recognized the fundamental
characteristics and allunnecessary details were
eliminated/The great advance that can be
credited to them is that they realized that a
small number of sound-expressing characters,
if well selected, are sufficient to express any
word^Other races at this period had phonetic
systems but they consisted of numerous sym-
bols and cumbersome appendages of non-al-
phabetic characters — "eye pictures" side by
side with "ear pictures." No doubt earlier
Phoenician writing passed through the stages
of development traceable in so many countries :

i. The pictures or characters suggesting
the thing or incident (picture writing).

1. The pictures or characters symbolizing
the thing or idea (ideographic or symbolic
writing).

3. The pictures or characters representing
the sound of the thing or idea (phonograms).

4. The sign suggesting the various sounds
of the language (alphabetic system).

To free this last stage from the others was
the great Phoenician contribution.

Why is A the first letter? It represents one
of the commonest vowel sounds in ancient
languages. Naturally the Phoenician alpha-

[6]

The Story of the Alphabet

bet makers selected a familiar object in the
name of which this particular vowel sound
was emphasized. Since food is of primal im-
portance, it is not surprising to find that he
chose the ox — "Alef" (ah'lef), or rather the
head of the ox, for the characteristics of ani-
mals are chiefly embodied in the head. Not
only was the ox important as food but also as
a beast of burden, for the ox had been har-
nessed to the plow centuries before the horse
was domesticated. Thus one of the earliest
and most important of man's friends among
the brute creatures was honored.

In making this letterrepeatedly and rap-
idly they became careless and instead of cross-
ing the letter V they tried to make it with one
continuous scratching, hence when the Greeks
became acquainted with it three to five cen-
turies after its invention, the picture had de-
teriorated almost beyond recognition. They in-
troduced balance and the V was inverted, and
the cross-bar was retained between the lines.
Unknowingly they were drawing the ox head
upside down; and it remains so with us to this
day. The Greeks called the first letter alpha,
the Romans called it A (ah) and we call it A
(ay), a sound it never possessed in Latin.

B

The second letter of the alphabet repre-
sents a crude house, roughly outlined. After
food, shelter is an important consideration
and this fact was expressed by the early al-
phabet maker. The Greeks again were igno-
rant of the picture and careless or indifferent
as to the exact name of the character, and
thus two triangles instead of the square sup-
porting a triangle were made and the name

[?]

The Story of the Alphabet

changed from "beth" to "beta" (ba'ta). Com-
bine the Greek names for the first two letters
and we have (alpha-beta) "alphabet." The
Romans shortened the name "beta," calling
it B (bay) and introduced the curved loops.
The original name is familiar to us through
names found in the Scriptures: Bethel (house
of God) and Bethlehem (house of bread).

C-G

The "ship of the desert," the camel, gave
its name to the third letter. Our name for this
animal is" traceable back to the Phoenician
"gimel" (ghe'mel) or "gamel" (gah'mel).The
long neck and the peculiar angle of the neck
in relation to the head could easily be repre-
sented. The Greeks made changes similar to
those in other letters- they improved the shape
and changed the name to "gamma." The Ro-
mans did not forget the curve and gave it both
the hard and soft sounds (kay and gay). Later
on, about the third century A. D., to distin-
guish the "g" sound from the "k" sound they
added a little bar below the opening. Thus we
get both C and G from the picture of the camel.

Stevenson said that when he was a child
the capital G always impressed him as a genii
swooping down to drink out of a handsome
cup. Kipling's story of the invention of the al-
phabet is filled with similar delightful stories
of the picture origin of letter forms.

D

The next letter D, came from a representa-
tion of a door— "daleth" (dahleth). It prob-
ably pictures the door of a tent. A custom
that prevails among the Arabs and in a num-

[8]

—— w

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The Story of the Alphabet

ber of countries gave particular importance
to the door of a tent — a stranger, or even an
enemy, if he entered through the door of a
tent must receive food, drink and shelter.
"Daleth" became "delta" with the Greeks
and D (day) with the Romans, who, of course,
rounded the angle.

E

The house picture gave us B, the door, D,
and the window, E. "He" (hay) meant to
look, to see, or window, and one writer as-
serts our familiar street cry "hey, there" can
be traced to these ancient times. One side bar
of the window was lost early.

The Greeks at first used this sound for the
long "e" (epsilon) but afterwards employed
the character H or "eta" for the long sound.
The Romans at first made no change except
to call it "eh."

This is the letter that occurs so frequently
in English words, and many no doubt recall
the interesting use that Poe makes of this fact
in his story "The Gold Bug."

Our letter order does not agree with that
of the Phoenicians or the early Greeks. Our
sixth letter, F, is missing in classical Greek,
but it is found in earlier writings. It comes
from a Phoenician representation of a hook
or nail (?) "vau." The Hebrew form resem-
bles the latter object. The nail was important
in shipbuilding, a common industry of the
early traders. When the Greeks used this let-
ter they called it "digamma" (double gam-
ma) and its form represented one "gamma"
(Greek c) superimposed over the other. The

[9]

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The Story of the Alphabet

Romans called it F (ef) and during the reign
of Emperor Claudius the consonant V was
represented by the F inverted. This was done
because the Latin alphabet had but one char-
acter to represent U and V and OCTAVIA
became OCTAdlA.

H

Two fence posts and three horizontal boards
gave us our eighth letter, H. The fence was
called "cheth" (haith). The Greeks omitted
the upper and lower boards thus making it
like our H, and called it "eta" (ata). The Ro-
mans gave it a soft sound H (hah) just as we
do today.

I -J

The parts of the human body also played
an important part in giving form to the let-
ters of the alphabet. The early peoples rec-
ognized the value of the hand and the head
and these members gave rise to the letters
I and K, and Q and R respectively. The hand
in profile bent at the knuckles and wrist
gives us the character "yod" (the hand) as
used by the Phoenicians. The Greeks, who
always liked to have their words end in vow-
els, added "a" and called it "Iota" (e-o'ta).
When the Romans received it, it was simply
a vertical stroke, I (ee) which represented
the same long "e" sound as it did with the
Greeks, but later they used it both as a con-
sonant and vowel, differentiating the con-
sonant by making the letter I longer, J; but
they did not give a distinct letter form for
the capital J until the sixteenth century.

The small j came into being nearly a cen-
tury later. The dot over the i was first intro-
duced in a thirteenth century manuscript.

[12]

HUB

The Story of the Alphabet

K

The silhouette of the open hand, with its
radiating lines, discloses the origin of the let-
ter K, "kaph," which signified hollow or palm.
We know that palmistry was practiced by the
ancients, and probably the association of read-
ing the hand and writing influenced the in-
clusion of this character. The Greeks added
their favorite vowel sound, "a," again and thus
obtained their "Kappa." The Romans had no
need for this letter at first, as C furnished the
same sound. When they did accept it, they
made no change.

The ox goad or whip lash, "lamed" (lah'
med) gave rise to the next letter. Herding oxen
and sheep was the important occupation of the
slaves of the Phoenicians and hence the last,
an object so unfamiliar to us, was easily rec-
ognized by them. The Greeks again added an
"a" and called it "lambda" and made it in the
form of an inverted V. The Romans, strangely,
adhered more closely to the original form than
did the Greeks.

M-N

The Phoenicians were lovers of the sea,
and from this source two letters were derived,
M and N. They explored not only all of the
Mediterranean shore at an early date, but
they also sailed boldly through the gates of
Gibraltar, and "beyond the world" where
they found Britain. They were the first navi-
gators that sailed by night and it is said they
discovered the north star. Therefore it is not
surprising that water "mem" (maim) is the

ti3l

4>§ S »

The Story of the Alphabet

source of M and that fish, "nun" (noon) the
source of N. The letter M has changed but
little in form, it is the Greek letter "Mu" and
the Roman M (em). The head of the fish,
from which the letter N is pictured, was sim-
plified even more than the head of the ox, in
A. It no doubt represents the fisherman's
viewpoint — not a swimming fish but a sus-
pended one. The Greeks reversed the stroke
and called it "Nu" and the Romans did not
change its form but called it N (en).

o

In Phoenicia, as in Egypt, China and Mex-
ico, the eye is one of the commonest elements
found in the writing. It was called "Ayin"
(ah-yin). The Greeks used it for two sounds
now designated by "omicron," little "o," and
"omega,"great"o,"the letter which,strangely,
was placed at the end of the Greek alphabet.
We find in the Bible: "I am the Alpha and the
Omega, the beginning and the end, the first
and the last." How many today would think
of using the alphabet for such an important
illustration? It is easy to trace the Roman O
(oh) from its Greek parent, "omicron."

Many letter pictures run in pairs — finger
and hand, water and fish — and now after eye
we find mouth "pi" (pe) which represents the
lower lip. The Greeks made little change in
the name or shape at first, but later they in-
troduced the angles and made the downward
strokes equal. The Romans formed the letter
by continuing the curve farther than the
Phoenicians and called it "pe" (pay).

[Hi

The Story of the Alphabet

8-R

Now we come to Q and R, the letters which
were mentioned above as those probably com-
ing from the head. Whether Q (koph) was de-
rived from the picture of the back view of the
head and neck, or whether it represents a
knot, which, no doubt, was as important to
navigators then as it is now, is a mooted
question. The Q sound is guttural and the
tail of the letter is supposed to indicate the
throat sound. The Greeks soon discarded
"koppa," as it was called, and the Romans
went back to the original source for their Q
(koo).

The back view of the head is the unusual
one, for as we look at the drawing of the early
races, or memory pictures, or the delineations
of a child of seven or eight we find they are
almost without exception profile pictures.
The Phoenician "resh" represents the profile
and shows very little resemblance to a hu-
man being, although at first the features may
have been more clearly indicated. The Greeks,
as was to be expected, turned the letter around,
and later, oddly enough, introduced a curve
making it exactly like the Roman letter P.
The extra stroke which we find in the Roman
letter was no doubt due to the carelessness in
copying. They pronounced it R (air).

There is a common legend explaining S, the
letter with the hissing sound. Because of its
curved shape and its hissing sound many peo-
ple believe it to be derived from a snake. Its
real history is easily followed from Phoeni-
cian "shin" or "sin" (teeth) to the present day.

[15]

The Story of the Alphabet

Its form closely resembled our W.The Greeks
madeit perpendicular for their "sigma"and the
Romans simplified and curved it giving S (ess) .

T

Our twentieth letter, T, is particularly in-
teresting because it is derived from "tahv"
a mark or cross made by people who could
not write, and no doubt their signature fre-
quently resembled it. We must not forget that
even Charlemagne and other kings of the mid-
dle ages had to make their mark or trace their
i nitials through stencil plates. The only change
of "tahv" to Greek "tau," and to Roman T
(tay) was the raising of the cross bar.

U - V- Y

The letters U, V and Y were all taken from
the letter "Upsilon," and it may have been
derived from the queer Hebrew form of
"Ayin" which closely resembles Y. The let-
ters U and V were interchangeable. Upsilon,
known as the "Samian letter," was used by
Pythagoras as an emblem to represent the
parting of the ways — the young man making
a choice in life.

w

Our Anglo-Saxon forefathers contributed
two letters, W (wen) and another often con-
fused with Y, called "thorn." These were in-
troduced during the thirteenth century. The
French always called the former letter double
vay, and in English it may be said to repre-
sent double U, as its name indicates. The let-
ter "thorn" had the value of the digraph
"th," and "ye" in old English should be pro-
nounced "the" like the definite article.

[16]

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The Story of the Alphabet

X-Z

Although we have no direct need for the
letter X, for Z can be substituted for it when
it is used as an initial letter, and "ks" when
used elsewhere, it has remained in the alpha-
bet since its frequent use by the Greeks. It
came from the Roman X (eex) which may
have been derived from the Greek "ksi." The
latter resembles the Phoenician character
"samech," meaning a post or support.

The dagger "zayin" from which we obtain
our Z must have been important in the daily
lives of the Greeks, Hebrews and Phoenicians
for it occupies the sixth place (Zeta) and the
seventh in the latter alphabets. The Romans
did not change its name or shape, but al-
though there has been little change in 2,000
years we see little resemblance to the short
sword in the letter the Romans gave to us.

MANY slight changes that have occurred
in the formation of the letters of the
alphabet may be accounted for. At first the
Greeks wrote from left to right in one line
and from right to left on the next line — a
mode of writing which has been termed "bous-
trophedon" because it runs as an ox plow does
in a field, up one furrow and down another.
It is due to this fact that many letters were
reversed from their original prototypes. It is
interesting to note that recently books for the
blind have been embossed in this manner.

The small letters of the alphabet, sometimes
called "lower case" letters because printers
keep them in a case below the capitals, or "mi-
nuscule letters" in contrastwith "majuscule,"
or capital letters, illustrate further changes

[17]

The Story of the Alphabet

due to rapid writing of capitals in a cursive or
running hand.

The few characters selected by the Phoe-
nicians, the great traders, artificers and farm-
ers of the ancient world, not only influenced
Greek literature and life, Roman and modern
nations in Europe, but also spread eastward
to the very walls of China. The Hebrews copied
them as a whole and retained the original names
with only slight variations. They did change
the shapes because a different writing instru-
ment was employed.

According to a legend, Jehovah gave the let-
ters to Moses, hence all the left curves in He-
brew letter form turn upward— as symbols of
a finger pointing heavenward.

The Phoenician alphabet is also the parent
of the Arabic, Indian, Javanese, Corean, Ti-
betan, Coptic syllabaries and alphabets. No
small country ever gave such a great gift to
humanity; no large country could have given
a greater gift.

[18]

- I - ■ -■ I

The Story of the Alphabet

THE ABCsOF THE

MUNDER
PRINTING PLANT

is the first letter of the
word "Art." Art in print-
ing means the style, the
elegance, its suitability to
the purpose for which it is
intended. Artis the"how"
of printed matter. Each
piece of printing should be dressed in that par-
ticular style which will make it most effective
in accomplishing its purpose. That is real Art.

Bis the first letter of the word "Business."
There is a saying that "business is busi-
ness," which means that it should be given the
very best possible attention and that all prom-
ises should be fulfilled. It is a very common ex-
perience to be looking for something and to be
really disappointed because it fails to come when
expected. Business would be more successful
if all lived up to requirements in this particular;
the fulfillment of a promise is an obligation.

Cis the first letter of a great word, "Cour-
tesy." Who cares to deal with a firm that
is discourteous? How pleasant business can be
made if all participating in it are pleasant and
courteous! Really, people will not deal with
those who are discourteous. On the other hand
they turn to those who are courteous and kind.
Do you know your A B C's in business?
And in your private affairs as well?

Norman T. A. MunderG?Co.

'BALTIdCOI^E

[19]

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